Mathetes

In the mornings, I like to come downstairs to make coffee for April and me.  As I'm waiting for the water to heat up and the coffee to brew, I like to sit quietly for a few moments in my thoughts or to pray.  Usually, its nice and quiet, but some mornings it's hard to concentrate because our son's room is adjacent to the living room, and he likes to go to sleep watching shows on his TV.  Sometimes that TV is *loud*, and I have to find ways to drown out the voices.  I'll put a fan on, or I'll turn on the living room TV and crank some white noise.  Still, the voices bleed through. There's another voice that we like to drown out, too, but it is even more relentless in how it cuts through our attempts to drown it out.  It's not an audible voice, but it is no less real.  This voice haunts us with reminders of how we fall short of our humanity.  We try to cover it up with bravado.  We try to turn it into a motivational voice for self-improvement....

 Martin Luther, the 16th century German reformer, is one of my heroes.  Among many things, Luther taught that there are two fundamental stories in this life:  the glory story and the story of the cross.  The glory story is the natural story of all of us, fueled by our desire to secure some kind of identity and security and significance for ourselves in the face of what we know is there: our finite limitations and, ultimately, our death.  The story of the cross, on the other hand, teaches us that the glory story is essentially a lie.  There is no path to self-glory, to self-security.  It's a myth, a closed circle that ends in death.  In fact, my addiction to my glory story is my real problem.  It chains me to myself, curves me inward selfishly.  But what the cross story offers us, in our union with Christ, is freedom through death to the glory story and resurrection to the new creation where we now belong to Someone and something bigger t...